THIRD-LEVEL RESEARCHERS will have a potentially lucrative day in the sun next Wednesday when Enterprise Ireland hosts a forum aimed at helping them to commercialise their work.

The highly difficult process of bringing concept to market has long been a focus for Enterprise Ireland, which has invested €275 million in third-level research and innovation since 2000.

The relationship has produced some fruit to date, with the agency supporting 18 start-up companies with roots in third level between 2005 and 2007.

This period saw 26 third-level start-ups, with 95 licences generated and hundreds of patents and invention disclosures filed.

As part of next week's forum, researchers will be able to draw on the experiences of a number of their peers who have succeeded in commercialising their work.

Prof Pádraig Cunningham of UCD's School of Computer Science and Informatics will, for example, be able to show off his work on a project aimed at stemming the volume of spam received by e-mail users. With the help of Enterprise Ireland, he produced a system that was able to detect certain keywords in e-mails.

This worked well in practice but came up against market barriers in the form of intense competition offering a very similar model.

Undeterred, Prof Cunningham refined the model to focus on "information leakage", whereby personal details can escape e-mail or other accounts and end up on the internet. His new product blocks and ranks documents in order of perceived risk and is in trials with a view to licensing.

Other researchers making presentations next week include Prof Ciarán Regan of UCD and Dr Michael Rogers of NUI Galway, who have won awards for commercialising their research.

The forum takes place in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin on Wednesday 18th from 9.30am to 1pm. A complimentary Guinness will be offered over lunch.